A long time ago, pruby used to get up every morning and build convoluted software monstrosities to feed society's insatiable appetite for data. Now he gets to work out how said monstrosities actually work, find a bunch of bugs, and send them home with a note. He's not sure this is more productive, but at least it's fun! Recently, pruby decided to build some software again, but time has moved on since he last did so. This required thinking about what actually does work, which positive trends to embrace, and what separates a "hard target" from what we're more used to seeing.